


Kin

by infamouslastwords



Series: Poison Arrow [2]
Category: The Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Canon Rewrite, Canon-Typical Violence, Canonical Character Death, Daryl Dixon-centric, Gay Daryl Dixon, Implied/Referenced Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, M/M, Mention of Daryl Dixon/Caesar Martinez, Merle Dixon Being an Asshole, Non-Explicit Sex, Prison (Walking Dead), Rick Grimes Loses His Mind, Season/Series 03, Slow Build, Slow Burn, Slow Burn Daryl Dixon/Rick Grimes, Slurs
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-14
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:53:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 18,484
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28072020
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/infamouslastwords/pseuds/infamouslastwords
Summary: Daryl wondered how long it would last. He knew he had a steadying effect on Rick and so was never far from him, made sure he was never alone for more than a moment. But he wondered what would happen when he couldn’t be around, anymore. Wondered just how long it’d take Rick to get back to himself, if such a thing was even possible.How many knives were waiting for him in the dark shadow the future cast?Daryl-centric Season 3 canon-compliant Rickyl slow build / slow burn. Includes many canon scenes that have been altered only slightly, to carry the subtext.
Relationships: Daryl Dixon & Carol Peletier, Daryl Dixon & Rick Grimes, Daryl Dixon/Rick Grimes
Series: Poison Arrow [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2031406
Comments: 14
Kudos: 29





	1. Dark Birds

“Rick—Rick, you with me?”

The man does not answer him. Daryl rounds on the group, a trill of panic running through him. His mind sharpens in these moments, becomes oriented on solving. He had not been close to Lori the way some of the others had been, and so this loss is a knife wound but it does not bleed quite yet, does not pour out of him as it pours out of Rick, now, gushing, as it would in one who removes a knife.

“We got anything a baby can eat?” Daryl asks, loud, turning his back on Rick’s delayed anguish.

“She needs formula soon, or she won’t survive,” Hershel tells him, his tone tempered. He runs his eyes over Daryl’s face, beseeching, letting him know.

“Nope,” Daryl agrees. “No way, not her.” _Her._ “We ain’t losin’ nobody else.”

He slings his bow over his back, throwing a measuring glance at the placement of the sun in the sky. A few hours—only a few hours before nightfall. If they didn’t have anything by then, it wouldn’t matter much, anyway.

He organizes the group into their duties, quickly, the thoughts coming to him as if it were handed down from on high. It is up to him, he realizes, striding across the concrete of the yard; up to him to make sure this all runs from this point on. He had thought about it at night, sometimes, the thought keeping him awake. He dared let it turn in his head. If the worst happened—if this happened. Carol knew the shadows on his face in the morning after those nights, knew what he had stuck in his throat that he was never, ever letting out. Too heavy to discuss, but enough to plan for on his own, enough to make sure everyone was safe if she died, and Rick just couldn’t handle it.

Carol. The thought of her sends a bolt of grief through Daryl’s stomach but he swallows it whole, pushes it down deep, then deeper. He throws his leg over his bike and slams his heel down on the kickstart. The engine rumbles into animation between his legs, and Maggie moves quickly to jump on behind him.

The daycare’s outdoor jungle gym is overgrown with kudzu and weeds. It makes it hard to distinguish where swing sets end and the ground begins. Daryl twitches his gaze from green-blanketed structure to green-blanketed structure as Maggie knocks a pane of glass clean out with the butt of her handgun. Anything could hide in there, Daryl thinks. Anything.

Once she has crawled through the window, Daryl follows. While Maggie digs into the first cabinets, he sets a shifty glance around the room, measuring, ensuring, making a mental note for escape. There are two exits that he can see from this large space, filled with countertops, toys, and two cribs. A crib. He files that away for future reference. And that is when his eyes catch it: the handprint. Cut out of construction paper and stuck to the wall, with paint on top of its surface—paint that preserves what was once the whorls and eddies carven on a little girl’s palm. Sofie, it reads, in kiddie handwriting. Daryl sets his jaw.

_No way, not her._

He shifts silently into the hallway to secure it. Maggie is moving as fast as she can and he does not fault her for it, but throwing the cabinet doors open and pushing past useless items is starting to make an awful lot of noise.

In the dimness of the hall he can hear his own heartbeat, louder than his footsteps, as he stalks from doorway to doorway through the structure. At a secure juncture he quickly delves a hand into his pocket and pulls out a penlight, holding it between his teeth. A scratching sound carries from a few rooms over, and Maggie must hear it too, as she meets him in the hallway.

She covers him as he opens the bottom half of the Dutch door in to the kitchen. The scratching is louder, more insistent, and he sees the pantry door shake. Holding a toy for the baby in his hand, he turns the knob and wrenches the pantry open in one fluid movement.

“All right, dinner,” he exclaims. He takes the possum by the scruff of its neck, removing the arrow that killed it.

“I’m not puttin’ that in my bag,” Maggie says with mild disgust. She moves into the room, and sighs with relief upon opening some cabinets next to the black refrigerator. She stuffs the four cans of powder formula in her bag as Daryl works on getting the still-warm animal into his messenger bag.

They get back fifteen minutes after nightfall. Making it through the wreckage on the interstate is one thing, weaving between those turned and flipped cars. But the race against the clock, the urgency he can feel radiating off Maggie’s form behind him, and the fact that the bike’s headlight only illuminates a few yards into the distance, makes for a terse ride. It was the thing he liked about bikes, the cagelessness. But now, in the inky darkness, he is overwhelmed by the lack of safety. There are spaces he doesn’t want to feel himself fizzling out into, melding with. He wants to be fully within the confines of his own body, feels the need for something around him to ensure those confines hold, and protect him in this way.

It seems that Beth prepares the formula in a matter of seconds. Daryl takes the baby from Carl’s sore arms and her piercing cries quiet for a moment, soften, then start up again. He tries gently bouncing and shushing, acclimating quickly to the feeling of this being in the crook of his arm. Then he is tilting the bottle to her mouth, and all at once the cries cease. The joy of holding her, watching her take greedily from the bottle he holds out to her is quickly lost amongst the deep well of grief that Carl dowses directly from his core.

“There’s Sofia… Carol…”

Daryl brings his eyes back down to the bundle in his arms, sets his mouth in a line. Carl keeps rattling off name after name, and each feels like a spark against Daryl’s bare skin. He wishes he could find solace in it, wishes he could assimilate the past into the future that this little one seems to illuminate for all those standing around him. But he can’t. He isn’t there, yet. He wonders, pulling the baby girl closer to him, tilting the bottle, already halfway drained. Those eyes lock with his, foreign and new. Will he ever be ready? One thing after another washes over him, and there is no end to the deluge. He forgets what it is like to be dry, to not be submerged.

“Lori—” the boy says, the name of his own mother, and Daryl knows he must say something, do something, before grief gets the boy too far gone.

So he angles the bundle in his arms, makes sure she is feeding right from the bottle in his hand. “You like that, lil’Ass-kicker?” he jokes as he does this. A small rumble of laughter erupts from the group, from Carl. “You like that, sweetheart?” he asks, as tenderly as he thinks he has ever said anything in his life. She moves against him like a rollie-pollie, her legs twitching as her wide eyes stare up at him, keep staring up at him. Carl joins him at his side, and he bends down to allow the boy to look into his sister’s face.

“Who’s had eyes on Rick?” Daryl asks, a few minutes later, once the baby has had her fill and he has handed her to Beth and Maggie. He makes sure that Carl is out of earshot, looking from face to face around the table. Oscar motions toward Glenn.

“I found him in the tombs,” the other man whispers, throwing a look at Carl who is looking at his baby sister squirm happily in Beth’s arms. “He’s not doing good at all,” Glenn asserts, his hard gaze slipping back to Daryl’s and making it clear exactly how bad things are.

Daryl nods once. Hershel has taken a seat nearby, face slightly pale from all the excitement of the day. But still hale, and hearty, his beckoning voice finds its way to Daryl’s ears. He moves to the table where Hershel sits.

“He didn’t recognize Glenn,” Hershel murmurs once Daryl has taken a seat. “ _Glenn_ ,” the name repeated and emphasized. The one who has been with him since the start, Daryl knows, since Atlanta, and waking up in the hospital at the end of the world.

Daryl grunts in understanding. Hershel’s kind eyes search his face, and he feels suddenly like he must give an answer. Only he has never been looked at this way, has never been looked to by so many eyes at once, searching his face for a plan as if one were written there in a language unknown and they were waiting, waiting for him to translate it for them.

“What d’you think we should do?” Daryl ventures. But Hershel only stares, soft gaze indeterminable.

“I’ll go,” Daryl finally vocalizes. “I’ll tell him about her.”

Glenn’s expression has some deep-seated doubt in it—whatever interaction he had with Rick must have shook him to the core. This only hastens Daryl’s movements away from the table, toward the door to the tombs.

“Take your knife,” Glenn warns, “and don’t get too close. He’s just—” Glenn shrugs, and the movement is helpless. “He’s not there.”

In the dank of the prison’s underbelly, now, Daryl hears a far-off gunshot ring. Some kind of urgency spurs his feet on, and he moves with a deftness through the corpses of felled walkers lining the pathway. Every single one, its skull obliterated into a mashed pulp. Daryl would be, under other circumstances, amazed by this—but the danger inherent in the possibility, the fear fluttering so rapidly inside his chest at the possibility of Rick’s thread pulling so tightly that it breaks, overwhelms this feeling of awe in the face of multiple, single-handed kills.

When he comes across the axe lying on the floor, and Rick nowhere around, Daryl breaks into an all-out sprint.

The trail of the dead leads him to right outside the boiler room. He almost slips in some viscera right off the steps down into the space but is able to grab onto the wall for support, and swings hurriedly into the dark hallway. He sees Rick’s silhouette, standing in the light coming in from the large fan vent. The other man’s back is to him, his hands hanging limply at his sides.

“Rick,” Daryl growls, loud enough to make his voice carry but not enough to startle. “Rick, it’s Daryl. It’s me, brother.”

He inches closer, against Glenn’s advice echoing around in his skull. He spots a knife in the other’s hand, grasped tight, and that arm slick with something up to the elbow. Blood. Daryl recalls the viscera by the door, recalls the absence of a body—sees the stabbed, fattened walker laying against the wall in the hall between himself and Rick.

“Oh, God,” he can’t help but whisper. Rick starts at this, and within a half second the other man is on him, that knife blade pressing into his neck.

Daryl gives a shout of surprise and manages to throw Rick off him, the other man’s wiry body smashing into the concrete wall opposite.

“Rick, it’s Daryl,” he shouts, grasping Rick’s arm behind his back and tweaking the knife from his iron grip. He pushes Rick’s chest to the wall, hoping to contain him, to hold him, to calm him down while one single thought runs through his brain: That walker ate Lori’s corpse, entire.

“Oh, God, Rick,” Daryl chokes, and the thought of it, the thought of Rick seeing this, takes up the whole cavity of his chest with pain. The other man is struggling viciously in his grasp, but at this angle it is not hard to keep those movements strangled and under wraps. Rick is weak—weaker than he is. There is a desperation there that is easy to slip between and inside of, and Daryl does so for the sake of his friend’s life.

“You gotta snap out of it, Rick. Whatever this is. You killed them. They’re gone.” Daryl shoves back against Rick’s bucking body. “Come on back to me.” The words pour out of Daryl’s mouth like a prayer. He can’t seem to stop their flow, the motley jumble of them pushing out against one another on their ways out of his throat. He presses his forehead, his face against Rick’s shoulder blades, desperate to quell the other man’s rough movements toward freedom, toward attack.

“Your daughter,” Daryl bites. “She’s so sweet. I fed her her first meal. She’s alive. She—” Daryl doesn’t know what to do. “She needs a name,” he shouts into the bloodied fabric of Rick’s t-shirt. “She needs her father to give her a name.”

This seems to reach the other man. He stops attempting to throw Daryl from him and instead lays flat against the wall, breath coming out in animalistic huffs. Daryl thinks they are in the clear before Rick is banging his forehead against the wall—slowly at first, and then purposefully, firmly. Daryl reaches up to place his palm between Rick’s forehead and the vertical surface, taking all the abuse against his knuckles. Like this he holds Rick, tight, seeking to flatten every ill-made movement until they become calm. So it lasts, all night, Daryl refusing to pull away, to give up. And, eventually, his efforts win out.

Worn out, Daryl can feel Rick’s lissome body slipping out from underneath his. He lets it, allocates room for them both to move down onto their knees. He makes sure that Rick is facing outward, and not scraping his jaw against the wall during this descent. Moving quickly during this eye of the storm, he checks Rick’s eyes to see if they are responsive to the beam from his flashlight. The dark pinpricks in the center of those ice blue pupils dilate, but the man is still catatonic. Daryl knows that no matter what he does he will not bring Rick out from himself—that he can only sit him down against some pipes as the gentle dawn light filters through the fan vent.

When he momentarily removes himself to retrieve Rick’s dropped knife, Rick grabs his arm firmly. It is the first conscious movement he has seen from the man in hours.

“She…?” Rick asks hoarsely. Daryl lowers himself, squatting on the floor, to bring his gaze level with Rick’s own.

“She,” Daryl confirms. “A baby girl.”

“A daughter,” Rick breathes. “Lori, a daughter—”

Daryl does not know if the other man is lucid enough to be able to remember this. He does not know how long this dark night of the soul will last. Extracting himself gently from Rick’s grasp, he fetches the other man his knife. Seeing Rick does not have the faculty to know what to do with it, Daryl straps it back into the sheath at Rick’s thigh and takes a deep breath in. He focuses on the brown-red blood on the skin of Rick’s cheek and draws his hand back, bringing it down in a firm slap against Rick’s face.

The other man sputters as if doused with cold water. Those blue eyes focus on Daryl’s face.

“You good?”

Rick’s only sounds are ones of surprise. Daryl clears his throat.

“You were in shock,” Daryl growls. “I need to know if you’re good.”

Rick nods, once, a slow trickle of fresh blood coming from the corner of his mouth. He brings his fingers up, wipes it away, holds his hand in front of his vision. Studies it. His own blood.

“Rick, listen.” His voice is firm enough that Rick draws his vision up to meet Daryl’s eyes. “I’m leaving. I’m sending someone down, Hershel probably. With more water, and with food. They’ll be here in a half hour.” Daryl brings his hand up to grasp Rick’s jaw firmly, almost painfully, hoping the pain will draw him back into his body. “I need to know you understand.”

Rick grimaces, but nods. “I—understand.”

“Do you wanna come with me?”

Rick’s face screws up. “No—no—”

Daryl grabs the fabric around Rick’s collar and pushes him back against the pipes. “Rick.”

The other man’s palm scrubs across his face. “I’m—I’m good,” Rick assures him thinly, placing a hand on his forearm. “Half an hour.”

“Half an hour,” Daryl confirms.

“Half—an—” Rick repeats, trailing off. He just nods, swallows, and Daryl doesn’t feel good about it but knows there is no other way. He removes himself from Rick’s side.

“Wait here,” he orders, tersely. Rick, again, nods.

…

Out on the grounds, a slow fog rolls back from the taller grasses, chased away by the rising sun.

Daryl combs a few fingers through his hair on his way across the grass, cutting a path diagonally away from the prison structure. On the outside of the gate, the world looks a lot bigger—the sky, stretching out, unimpeded by the dense forest he had become so accustomed to over the winter.

Exhaustion hangs heavily in his body. He feels it in his every limb’s movement now, not sleeping—holding on to Rick, holding Rick up, through the night. The cool dampness of the air is bracing, but underneath he feels a primal desire to slip into the earth and sleep—just for a moment. Only a moment.

The graves. Daryl ignores the hitch of hesitance that worms its way into his blood. _She isn’t there_ , something taunts against his stride, each footstep falling closer to that mound, that makeshift cross. He smooths his hair down again, tucks it behind his ear. He slows his gait as he reaches a few yards outside the grave, tries to be respectful. A funeral. No time for a funeral, even, just a grave, dug, and empty.

He stops at the foot of the mound. He reaches into his inner vest pocket, careful not to rip what he draws out from within. A single white Cherokee rose that he lays against the rocks spelling out the initial “C”, a delicate thing like tissue paper that threatens to blow away in the meager morning wind.

So, like a coffin, he takes a little dirt and throws it onto one pure white leaf. He presses his fingers into it, the easily bruised flesh of the flower, before sighing.

“Carol,” he tries. He has to clear his throat for a moment before he can continue. “This is weird. You’d make fun of me so much, talkin’ to your empty goddamn grave.”

The wind whistles across the pasture, shaking some of the chain link with a metallic clinking.

“Anyway,” he continues. “Lori’s gone, and Rick… Rick’s gone in another way.” He pauses, bites his cheek, tilts his eyes up to the sky to try and stop the welling of emotion rushing toward the surface. “You—You’d know what to do.” He digs his fingers into his bent knees, trying to keep it all inside himself, inside his body. “God, Carol. I wish you were here.”

A sleek formation of birds flies in a V-shape from one end of the sky to another. Daryl watches them go before bringing his gaze back to the grave, to the cross at its head.

“One life down, eight more to go...” His voice is a whisper. “You better come back soon, so we can laugh about all’a this.”

He pauses for a moment, before lifting himself up from the ground. He gives a final touch to the wood of the crooked cross before filing back across the way he came, the bottom of his pant legs dampened from collecting morning dew.

…

He finds an exhausted Glenn leaning over a table in the mess, dark circles under his eyes. Maggie is in a sleeping bag on the floor, next to his feet. He stirs slightly upon seeing Daryl, takes a deep breath in.

“How was he?”

Daryl shakes his head. “I dunno.”

Glenn pulls his face into a thoughtful frown. “Is he alone now?”

Daryl nods in the affirmative. “I was gonna have Hershel go,” he says. “I won’t make you go back down there,” he tells Glenn, looking gently out from the corner of his eye.

Maggie stirs in her sleeping bag, bringing herself from the floor while rubbing her face.

“That Daryl?” she drawls.

“Yeah,” Glenn replies. “He’s going to get Hershel.”

“The baby okay?” Maggie’s voice is muddied by sleep and concern. “Rick…?”

“Yeah, everything’s fine, honey.” Glenn lays a palm against her shoulder, nodding at Daryl. Daryl takes this as a sign to leave, padding his way over to cell block C and Hershel’s room.

“Hershel,” he murmurs into the cell. He hears a cry from a few cells away, something thin and warbling. Followed by that is the soft music of Beth’s singing, something gentle, something full of soothing hums. The cries stop.

Hershel stirs inside the cell, opening his eyes and becoming acquainted with the light.

“What is it?”

Daryl shifts his head toward the boiler room. “Rick. Can you go see him after breakfast? I gotta clear the lower levels before somethin’ wanders over his way.”

Hershel pulls himself up to a sitting position, leaning heavily on his one knee. “Have you slept at all, young man?”

Daryl shakes his head. “Don’t matter.”

“Have you eaten?” Hershel is pulling his button-up on over his undershirt, slipping his arms through the elastic of his suspenders.

“Nah.”

“Daryl, eat something before you go get clearing. And for God’s sake, take someone else with you.”

Hershel pushes out of his cell, swinging from the crutches. Daryl steps out of his way, follows him down to Beth’s room.

“Bethy,” Hershel calls. “We’re making breakfast. Come down.”

From beyond the curtain blocking her room, Beth’s singing stops. “Okay,” she calls, a hint of self-conscious embarrassment tinging the tone. “Be right there.”

Breakfast is a bowl of granola and powdered milk. Daryl sits on the stairs, next to Oscar, who is propped up against the railing. He can’t stop watching Carl, noticing the way that peach-fuzz face has sunken in overnight. He knows he isn’t the only one who hasn’t slept. The boy needs something to do, Daryl thinks, so he turns his face up to Oscar.

“Wanna help clear the lower levels?” he asks.

The other man shrugs gruffly. “Sure,” comes the reply. “You and me?”

Daryl nods. “You know your way ‘round?”

“A bit. Been a while.”

Daryl squints, moving the corner of his mouth. “We’ll figure it out.” He takes some grain into his spoon, lifts it to his mouth before setting his eyes back on Carl. The boy had barely eaten more than a spoonful.

“Carl’s comin’, too,” Daryl adds.

Oscar looks a bit surprised at this. “Shouldn’t he be restin’? Y’know, after all of it?”

Daryl takes another mouthful, chews. “Sometimes you need to do somethin’.”

Oscar snorts, but it isn’t derisive—just dumbfounded. “Cannot relate,” he says with relish. “That shit happened to me… I’d hole up in my bunk with junk food for a week.”

Daryl squints at him. “Yeah, well, we don’t exactly have an infinite supply of Ho Ho’s. Killin’ walkers is the next best thing.”

Oscar sighs, scooping the last of his breakfast to his mouth. “To each his own,” the other man assents.

Daryl returns his gaze to Carl’s peaked face. A few foot falls ring in the hallway, and all at once everyone turns.

“Everybody okay?”

The Rick standing in front of them now is unrecognizable to how Daryl had last seen him barely twenty minutes prior. He lets his spoon fall from his mouth, frozen. No more blood, a clean shirt, eyes slightly shifty but still—nearly all there. He moves his gaze from Rick to Hershel, and back to Rick.

“Yeah, we are,” Maggie assures him. She gestures at the baby Beth is holding in her arms, but Rick’s gaze is locked on his son as he steps closer to the table.

“What about you?” Hershel asks.

Daryl notices that Rick sets his jaw uneasily, the fine musculature jumping just underneath the skin’s surface. “I cleared out the boiler block.” He looks down at Carl who is looking up at him.

“How many were there?” Daryl calls from across the room. He was there, he saw them, and he knows how many there were—he just wants to know how tethered to reality Rick is, how much Rick can recall, remember.

“I dunno,” comes the reply. “A dozen, two dozen.” Rick doesn’t take his eyes off his son. “I have to get back. Just wanted to check on Carl.”

Glenn stands up, suddenly, trying to put himself into Rick’s line of vision. “We can take care of the bodies, Rick. You don’t have to do that,” he says.

“No. I have to,” Rick bites at him, not quite meeting his eyes. The words hit Glenn like a blow and Daryl even winces in sympathy. That is when Rick strides over to Daryl, already changing the subject.

“Everyone have a gun? A knife?”

The question is directed toward him. Daryl tilts his face up to Rick’s, worrying the red plastic spoon in his hand. He remembers what it was like to wrench the knife from the other man’s bloody grip, the knife that had been at his neck. It was different than all the times Rick had wrangled him, shoved him away when he got mouthy—it was like crossing the line between swimming in the ocean, and a riptide carrying him out to sea.

“Yeah,” Daryl confirms. “We’re runnin’ low on ammo though,” he adds, slowly, measuredly, trying to pull out the burrs from the landscape of the other man’s face. He is trying to pick apart the puzzle, see the spots where it will all become a problem again.

“Maggie and I were planning on making a run this afternoon,” Glenn volunteers, still standing. “For more formula, too.”

Rick just nods, his hands on his hips, not exactly meeting anyone’s eyes.

“They cleared the generator room,” Daryl adds. He isn’t sure that Rick realizes he has a daughter—isn’t sure that Rick remembers him saying so. “Axel’s down there trying to fix it. In case of emergency,” he stresses, and as he takes in Rick’s pale face it is almost like asking, _What kind of emergency are we having, now, though?_

“We’re gonna sweep the lower levels, as well,” he says, making sure Rick knows there is nowhere he cannot, and will not, find him.

“Good,” Rick murmurs as he begins to stride away, his legs full of a manic energy. “Good,” he says again, but Daryl can tell he has hit a sore spot. The other man will not meet his eyes. Rick exits as suddenly as he had come in, ignoring Hershel’s firm call of, “Rick.”

Daryl watches the shuttered doorway, slides his eyes to Carl’s unmoving expression. Then he meets Hershel’s eyes, gives him a simple nod. Beth pulls the baby closer to her chest, not knowing why the newborn’s father did not acknowledge his daughter’s presence. An uneasy air seems to settle over them all in the mess.

“Eat your breakfast,” Daryl calls out to Carl in particular. The boy jolts and, almost without thinking, brings another spoonful of granola to his mouth. Daryl places his half-finished bowl beside him on the step, avoids meeting the curious expressions from the others as they try to figure out the cause of his uncharacteristic outburst. Or maybe they are waiting for the next answer, and the next, and the next—as if his name were Rick Grimes, and not Daryl Dixon.

…

“Guess that takes a little urgency out of the situation,” Hershel comments as he swings over to Daryl’s side—Daryl, who is collecting the dishes with Carl after breakfast.

“Guess so,” Daryl mutters back. “I’m still clearing the lower level, though. Don’t trust it.”

“Don’t trust it... or Rick?”

Daryl shoots a look at Carl, who is within earshot. Hershel sighs.

“Let the boy understand.”

But Carl, whether he hears this or not, moves toward the far end of the room with a rag and commences wiping down the tables.

“I had a plan,” Daryl starts. “If—If Lori—” He raises his eyebrow, dunking the dishes in a shallow pan of rainwater, bleach, and soap before running a cloth over them. “Y’know.”

Hershel shifts his weight impatiently from crutch to crutch. “What’s your plan?”

“Do what I can,” Daryl answers. He knows it sounds lame coming out, but he is not quite convinced that he must, or should, take over the role Rick has so swiftly and suddenly abdicated. “You saw him, though. Givin’ orders like always. Maybe... I dunno, y’know?”

Hershel doesn’t say anything to this. The gentle slop of water over the interior of the bowls echoes around the room.

“Rick’s always considered you his right hand. Did you know that? Since winter, and the road.”

Daryl is surprised by this. “He hasn’t said anythin’.”

“Does he need to?” Hershel asks gently, yet firmly. Daryl meets the older man’s eyes, not able to look at them too long, not able to handle the earnestness there for more than a moment.

“Daryl, I know this is all sudden… but you’re going to need to take over.” Hershel’s measured timber nails each word into the sentence, brings the gravity of the situation immediately to hand. Daryl can feel the weight of its importance like a pocket full of stones. “I’d step in, too, but now that my leg is gone, I’m more worthless than what I used to be.”

Daryl throws a look over Hershel’s shoulder to where Carl has stopped running the rag over the metal tables, frozen in place, listening.

“And you have, you’ve stepped in already.” Hershel’s eyes almost gleam in the morning light coming through the tall, barred windows—like he knows a secret, like he knows what will happen before it has happened. “But Rick—Rick’s nowhere near done bein’ this way, if I’m guessin’ right.”

Daryl holds the gaze, now. Behind Hershel, Oscar steps into the mess with his hands in his coverall pockets and the butt of a handgun sticking out of his back pocket.

“Ready, Dixon?”

Hershel nods before swinging away, exiting the room.

“Yeah.” Daryl shakes his hands off into the air, whistling at Carl. The boy looks up from under the brim of his brown sheriff’s hat. “Let’s go.”

…

The walker, all gout-bloated, has an inmate identification number stamped across the right side of his coveralls, but no name. As he pulls Carol’s knife from the tire-like ring of fat around its neck, Daryl must suppress a desire to stab and instead firmly runs the blade across the number, across the shoulder. The thought of sinking it in, the blade biting into fetid flesh, is overwhelming. Was this the one who ended it? He’s a good size, Daryl sees, looking down to his stomach. Did he eat Carol, like the other one ate Lori? He cannot shake the image of Rick’s arm soaked in blood up to the elbow. The grip with which the other man had held that knife to his throat.

“Go check on Axel,” Daryl manages to bite. “We’re done here.”

Oscar senses something, and Daryl knows he puts a hand on Carl’s shoulder as he remains leaned, crouched, over the body of the walker. Wiping the knife blade, wiping it over and over.

“You got it, boss.”

Daryl doesn’t look, only listens to their retreating footsteps as he stares into the face of the walker. He knows he doesn’t have to fight it, anymore. He can let go and sink into the hot steel wires of anger, of grief, running through his limbs.

Like an animal, he wrecks the face beyond any kind of recognition.

Sitting, still feeling very far away from sated, against the wall in the hall of solitary cells, Daryl has wiped the blood from his arms but cannot stop worrying Carol’s knife in his hand. He had tried to leave but was not able to bring himself up those steps. He cannot stop stabbing, downward, forceful, as he thinks about Carol’s empty grave. The yawning maw of it like something that could swallow him whole, like his thoughts swallow him whole now. The darkness of the hallway becomes the darkness within his mind’s eye, and there is a feeling so deeply seated within him of nightmarish and total loss, of being lost in a forest, devoid of any sense of direction. When he closes his eyes, stabbing, he looks around the lush greenery only to find enemies behind every tree. He sees Carol, her skin grey and falling from her bones, lumber toward him. He sees Rick, his face sloughed off, with a dead yellowness ringed around once-blue eyes.

 _Rick_. The loss is a collective loss, a profound loss. He wonders if this is what falling into space feels like—as if there were no counterweight to hold his body to the earth anymore, to hold himself inside of his body: The ephemeral him that has swallowed so much over the past day, has thought so much about doubt, and fear, and confusion, until these things are all the same piece of coal being crushed, compacted, within him.

Daryl stabs the wall now, insistent, unable to suppress the restlessness in his limbs. He jumps, pulls himself up, pumping himself up, as the weakened walkers trapped behind the solitary door across from him push against the door to a weak and erratic rhythm. He paces, fitful, before clamping the blade of the knife between his teeth. He dips and ferociously drags the dead walker away from the bottom of the door, rushing over to pull it open, knife blade raised high above his head, ready to sink it into the next undead face that hovers in front of his eyes.

That is when he sees her, and the rate at which the sadness and anger drain from his body makes him feel like he is losing blood. He drops to his knees, not registering the pain of his kneecaps hitting concrete, not registering anything much at all: He puts a hand on her face, not believing that the skin there is real and alive, albeit cool. Carol. Her eyes flicker open and she smiles in the smallest way before he is scooping her into his arms, rushing her out into the bright light of the noon sun out in the yard.

As he watches her tilt a bottle of clear water to her lips, another formation of dark birds flies from one end of the sky to another. Their shadows touch his shaking palms, touch Carol’s hip where her empty knife sheath is tied to her.

And Daryl watches them go.


	2. Poison Arrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Follows the events of S03E07 ~ S03E11.

In the heat of the afternoon forest, Daryl cannot stop his mind from tracing back to the SUV they’ve just left as his feet pound the earth below him. He isn’t trying to be quiet, anymore. He cannot stop his mind from conjuring up images of the man, the people, he has just left.

“Stop here, little brother,” Merle commands. “Gonna set me up a trip wire for the little bunny rabbits hidin’ out.”

Daryl finds some shade under a slim-trunked tree, presses his back into its rigidity and allows it to support his wearied weight. Then, he closes his eyes for a second, just a second.

* * *

They were a few minutes into their journey to Woodbury when Rick threw a glance his way. Daryl had his hand outside the window, seated on the passenger’s side, letting the slow breeze made from the SUV’s trajectory run over his knuckles and between his fingers.

“Carl named her, just now,” Rick had said to him, quietly. Daryl turned, their eyes meeting.

“What’d he choose?”

“Judith.” Rick smiled, proud.

Daryl nodded. “Judith Grimes.” He turned back to watch his hand knife through the air. “Good name.”

“After his third-grade teacher.”

Daryl swallowed, resting his eyes for a moment.

“Careful,” Rick had warned after a few beats, his voice gentle as the soft sunlight ran over Daryl’s face in waves. “Watch the road if you’re gonna be dangling walker bait out the car like that.”

Daryl removed his arm, rolled up the window. Rick’s faculties had been wavering from one minute to the next, but, looking at the man now, Daryl would’ve never guessed he’d been losing his mind in the tombs just a day before.

But Daryl wondered how long it would last. He knew he had a steadying effect on the man and so was never far from him, made sure he was never alone for more than a moment. But he wondered what would happen when he couldn’t be around, anymore. Wondered just how long it’d take Rick to get back to himself, if such a thing was even possible.

How many knives were waiting for him in the dark shadow the future cast? He felt it stretch between them in the cabin of that SUV, saw it in the peripherals of his vision as Rick’s good arm gripped the gear shift and brought them up a particularly steep hill. The drop on the other side, the speed they took over it, rose Daryl’s stomach into his throat in one exhilarating, debilitating moment. He clutched instinctively at the hand rest inside the door, knuckles white, while Rick threw him a roguish smile in the scant rays of sun filtering through the thick foliage stretching above, reaching for the blue, blue sky.

* * *

Daryl opens his eyes. Rick’s face is like an imprint of light against his cornea. The last sight of it, bereft, stolen from over his shoulder as Merle pulled him away with a triumphant smirk, one move away from flipping ‘Officer Friendly’ the bird with his one remaining hand. Walking away from that took more out of him than he admits, even to himself, now. He holds his stomach, the greenness of the surrounding summer leaves almost sickening, as the sound of Merle’s piss hitting the ground somewhere behind him reaches his ears. He breathes in deeply and the nausea passes, so he takes his crossbow into his shoulder, play-aims at a nearby tree.

“There ain’t nothing out here but mosquitos and ants,” he tells Merle, throwing an irritated gaze over his shoulder. “We been out here for hours.”

The sound of Merle zipping up his fly rings out into the small clearing. “I think you’re just trying to lead me back to the road, man,” his brother drawls dubiously. “Get me over to that prison.”

Daryl’s face darkens, and he rolls his next words carefully on his tongue before deciding that Merle won’t take much damage from them. He is careful to be objective, make his side sound smart.

“They’ve got shelter, food. A pot to piss in.” Daryl pauses. “Might not be a bad idea.”

Merle, squatting over his trip wire, throws a spiteful look his way. He knows it is spiteful without daring to turn his head, meet it.

“For you, maybe. Ain’t gonna be no damn party for me.”

Daryl is tired. Somehow one hour with Merle has felt like two days. He had forgotten how lightly he must tread around the other man. How cautiously he must monitor his words. How something is always roiling underneath the surface of his brother, looking for a good time to strike from where it is watching, always watching, hidden in the place beneath.

“Everyone’ll get used to each other,” Daryl says softly, turning further away from Merle under the guise of searching for some critter with his bow. Merle messes with his trip wire a few moments longer before giving up.

“They’re all dead. Makes no difference,” his brother says, as casual as anything. It takes a moment for the weight of the words, said so lightly, to hit him. But even then he is thinking that his brother is just trying to scare him. That it would be impossible for Rick to lose after such an attack. With Merle under his skin, Daryl squints.

“How can you be so sure?”

Merle chuckles, knowing he has gotten to his little brother. “Right about now, he’s probably hosting a housewarming party where he’s gonna bury what’s left of your pals.”

The Governor. Daryl recalls the man, the sadist who tested loyalty in an arena menaced by walkers. How Merle had said that was the only way they’d get their rocks off, some days, when the going got slow. Daryl goes pale despite himself.

Behind him, Merle spits. The thing beneath watches warily. “Let’s hook some fish. C’mon.”

* * *

Fresh out of the hum of the SUV, Daryl felt uneasy around Rick for a yet-unknown reason. He had tried to shake it off as they walked, right foot, left foot; he tried to leave the sudden feeling of unbelonging amongst the dirt path of the old one-lane country road.

Eventually, Rick cleared his throat. They were shoulder to shoulder, with Oscar and the swordswoman lagging a distance behind. “I know what you did for me, for my baby, while I was…” The other man trailed off quietly, and Daryl made a conscious effort to close his mouth. “… workin’ things out. Thank you.”

Daryl had shrugged. But then he tried harder, tried better to display exactly what he was thinking, what he was feeling. He recalled Judith and her little face. He remembered being the first person to feed her, to make her stop crying, to clothe her in the specially-sewed onesie he and Carol had made.

“It’s what we do.” The reply was simple, but Daryl meant every syllable of it. He tried to find something else to follow up with, to make sure his feelings were concretely relayed, before he sensed Rick responding beside him.

“Y’know, when Carl told me you were callin’ her Ass-Kicker…” He saw Rick nod, that dignified face set in an expression of contemplation. “I—well, that was the first time I laughed, since.”

There was a finality to that last word, and Daryl knew the other man hadn’t simply trailed off. It was very clear to him that Rick’s conscious mind thought of his wife’s death and the birth of his daughter like this: Before. Full stop. Since. Full stop.

Daryl had still been holding his bow in front of his chest, finger sidled next the trigger, as he threw his gaze over to Rick. For a brief moment their eyes connected; Daryl squinting in the shade, and Rick’s bright eyes open against the sun. A breeze blew an errant leaf from over Rick’s shoulder, and Daryl felt like the breath he took existed outside of time: Calmly in, calmly out, preserving Rick’s form within his vision. Then, just like that, Daryl slid his gaze back to the road. And time galloped to catch up.

* * *

“Smells to me like the Sawhatchee Creek,” Merle remarks. Daryl falls back into his body, looking around at the approaching riverbed, the signs of past high water apparent against the underbrush nearby.

“We didn’t go west enough,” he retorts immediately, not thinking. “If there’s a river down there, it’s gotta be the Yellow Jacket.”

“What do you wanna bet?” Merle fires back.

Daryl sighs inwardly, biting his thumb to suppress his irritation. “I don’t wanna bet nothing. It’s just a body of water. Why’s everything gotta be a competition with you?”

He guesses he did not sufficiently mask his bile by the look on Merle’s face.

“Woah, woah,” the other man calls out, throwing up his hands in almost theatrical shock. “Take it easy, little brother. Just trying to have a little fun here. No need to get your panties all in a bundle.”

That is when a distant cry meets his ears. He raises an arm to Merle, signaling for silence.

“You hear that?”

Merle shakes his head, dismissing it. But Daryl listens keenly.

“It’s a baby,” he realizes out loud, and his body is off following that sound before he’s even aware he is doing it.

* * *

Getting into the camp, the town, had been easier than Daryl could have imagined. Under the cover of night, they quickly maneuvered inside the back of a building, the swordswoman leading the way. Still wary, still alert, Daryl flanked Rick as closely as he dared while flashing glances around corners and up walls. The town looked untouched—Daryl could not assimilate this sight into their prison life. The town looked like one he would never be welcomed in, in the time before. Affluent, yuppie, with coffee shops that had warbling singer-songwriter CDs for sale next to the register.

“This where they held you?” Rick whispered to the swordswoman.

“Questioned,” she corrected him with some sarcasm in the tone.

The room was empty. Daryl stole over to the window, a curtain upon which light from outside danced fitfully. Out on the street, there were a dozen people walking to and from their residences, chatting, milling. He bit his cheek angrily.

“I thought you said there was a curfew,” he growled at the swordswoman. She stared at him with daggers in her intelligent, dark eyes.

“Those are stragglers,” she emphasized.

Daryl shifted his gaze toward Rick, who was next to him at the other window.

“If anyone comes in here, we’re sittin’ ducks. We gotta move.”

“They could be in his apartment,” the swordswoman thought out loud.

He and Rick whipped their heads around at the same time, faces full of pissed off disbelief.

Daryl started to advance on her. “Yeah? What if they ain’t?”

“Then. We’ll. Look. Somewhere. Else,” she replied as if speaking to a particularly dim-witted child.

Daryl stalked close to her, anger flaring, his finger jumping next to the trigger of the crossbow at his side.

Then an older man from the town entered the room, calling out, not knowing what he was walking into. Daryl hid behind a curtain that Rick snuck into, waiting until the man had come far enough into the darkness of the room. Rick pushed forward, the muzzle of his Python almost in the man’s mouth.

“Shut up,” he ordered. “On your knees.”

Daryl started pulling zip ties from his pocket, holding them between his teeth while he secured the older man’s wrists behind his back. Once Rick had pushed the cloth gag past the man’s lips, he gave Daryl a silent nod. Quickly, Daryl snapped the butt of his crossbow against the back of the man’s skull. He crumpled to the ground, knocked out cold.

As they slid the body into the shadows of the curtain, Daryl noticed that Rick’s flannel had ripped at the underarm from his exertion.

“Give that to me, after,” he murmured as they watched for the all-clear, trying to slide out the front door and onto the street unnoticed. “I’ll fix it.”

Rick took a look down at himself, then nodded. “Okay,” he breathed. “Thanks.”

* * *

Daryl raises his crossbow to the back of Merle’s skull.

“Let ‘em go.”

The family pleads in a language he cannot understand, the crying of that baby reminding him so much of Judith that his heart jumps with concern. Merle’s rummaging stops.

“I know you’re not talking to me, brother,” the other man says, menacing. Daryl ignores him, turning toward the husband.

“Get in your car and get the hell outta here,” he says. “Go!”

Merle starts to extract himself from the backseat, one eye on Daryl, staring sideways. Daryl stares back until Merle is fully out of the vehicle, keeps staring, not backing down, until the family has gotten back onto the road, out of range of any gunshot Merle could aim their way in retribution. Once they are gone he pulls his bow up, boyishly, as if it were his own toy that he has successfully stolen back from his brother.

Merle does not say a word, only has a cheated glint in his eye as Daryl turns his back to him and begins to walk to the forest.

“So much for fishin’, hm?” Merle says lazily, after a minute back under the shade of the forest canopy. “Could’ve had us some beaner baby. Think they taste like hot sauce?”

Daryl spits. “Man, shut up with that racist shit. Shut up, period. You’re givin’ me a headache.”

“No, that’s just the hunger, brother,” Merle retorts, ignoring Daryl’s request. “Bet they would. Taste like—”

“Shut up,” Daryl repeats, cutting the insult off and rounding on the other man.

“Oh?” Merle’s mouth pulls back into a slick smirk. “Little brother, did you grow some balls in my absence? That,” Merle takes a few cocksure steps toward him, a sudden coldness settling over his flat features. “Or have I just fallen out of your good graces?”

* * *

The thick fog from gunfire and smoke screens alike was still caught in Daryl’s lungs as they regrouped in the general store, Maggie tending to Glenn’s wounds as he, Oscar, and Rick paced from covered window to covered window.

“Daryl,” Glenn choked. “This was Merle.”

A cold shock ran through Daryl.

“It was,” Glenn continued. His expression must have shown his disbelief. “He did this.”

“You saw his face?” Rick was asking before Daryl could comprehend.

Glenn nodded, his eyes shifting from Rick’s to Daryl’s. “Threw a walker at me. Was gonna execute us.”

“Does he know I’m still with you?” Daryl’s mind skipped like a warped record. His brother. Alive?

Maggie just nodded, feverish, before turning back to quickly wrap Glenn’s bleeding wounds.

Adrenaline-high, Daryl felt the world inside this small store exit stage right. If the others were speaking, he did not catch it. If there was gunfire on the street, he could not hear it. It had all turned into a garbled mess of noise and shadowed light.

Then, suddenly, everyone was up and moving. Daryl, brain catching up to his body, called over to Rick. “Hey, if Merle’s around, I need to see him.” He hadn’t cared if his voice was thin, desperate.

“Not now.” Rick’s voice was clear and firm. “We’re in hostile territory.”

Daryl took a step forward. “He’s my brother, he ain’t gonna—”

Rick’s voice had been a hard slap to the face. “Look at what he did!” Rick threw his arm out to Glenn, motioning at the man’s broken body. Daryl balked, knocked unsteady. When Rick continued his voice was gentler, insistent. “We gotta get outta here. Now.”

Daryl still tried to bargain. His brother was alive. This was all he could think. His dead brother was alive. “Maybe I can talk to him, maybe I can work something out—!”

Rick’s retort was immediate. “You’re not thinkin’ straight.” The other man tried to catch his gaze, had tried to let this stare sober him. “Look, no matter what they say, they’re hurt. Glenn can barely walk. How’re we gonna make it out if we get overrun by walkers and this governor catches up to us?” Rick was closer to him, his body, now, and the heat from the other man had poured off of him in waves. “I _need_ you,” Rick growled with a concrete finality.

A little bit of Daryl’s sanity had returned at this statement. He held Rick’s gaze, felt his breath come to him more evenly.

“Are you with me?” Rick almost whispered, a question shared just between the two of them. Daryl swallowed, hard, and nodded once.

“Yeah.”

He never knew how much loyalty one word could hold.

* * *

Merle is manic, calculating, panting. “Y’know—You know what’s funny to me? You and Sheriff Rick are like this, now.” His brother holds up his index and middle fingers, intertwined. The gesture is reminiscent of all the times his brother has made fun of his closeness to other men, and one of his more mild ones, at that. “I bet you a penny and a fiddle of gold that you never told him that we were planning on robbing that camp blind.” The words are like acid spit from his mouth.

Daryl sets his jaw. “It didn’t happen,” he tells the other man, voice low, molars grinding, daring him to say one word more about a man who is no longer who he is.

“Yeah, it didn’t, ‘cause I wasn’t there to help you,” Merle exclaims. His voice booms into the treetops, upsetting a few roosted birds into flight.

“What, like when we were kids, huh?” Daryl spits back. “Who left who then?”

Merle explodes, eyes wide and wild. “Is that why I lost my hand?”

“You lost your hand,” Daryl shouts, “because you’re a simpleminded piece of shit!”

Merle lunges at him. Daryl, slowed by the heaviness of his rage, is only able to stagger to the side as Merle’s hand balls into his shirt. It rips from him as he falls to his knees in the mud.

Merle’s sudden quietness tells him that the other has seen. Seen his scars made from the gold buckle of their dad’s favorite belt.

“I—” comes the choked voice. “I didn’t know he was—”

“Yeah,” Daryl bites. “He was.” Daryl starts to pick up his pack, his bow, that had fallen from him in the scuffle. Without another word he begins to pick his way through the underbrush, swinging around tree trunks, back toward the prison.

“Where you goin’?” Merle calls after him.

“Back where I belong,” Daryl replies definitively.

* * *

Glenn’s voice reached his ears. “No, Merle is _your_ blood. My blood, my family, is here.” Glenn’s eyes did not leave his. “And, waiting for us back at that prison.”

Daryl tore his gaze away to throw it into the tree line where Merle waited, waited for this to be done. So confident that Daryl would choose. Daryl, shoved into a corner. The familiar box returned, deftly, now that his brother was back in the picture.

He was considering pacing on the blacktop of the highway when Rick turned to him.

“And you’re part of that family. But he’s not.”

Daryl started to shake his head.

“He’s not,” Rick emphasized, repeated.

Daryl had taken a long look at everyone, and it felt like he had been looking up from the bottom of a well. “Man,” he pleaded. “Y’all don’t know.”

Rick’s jaw shook as he took a step back. It still hadn’t stopped him.

“Fine,” Daryl decided. “We’ll fend for ourselves.”

Glenn was quick to jump in. “That’s not what I was saying.”

Daryl just shrugged, already letting the decision begin to harden his movements, his words. “No him, no me,” he said gruffly.

“Daryl, you don’t have to do that,” Maggie tried. “Don’t have to give up what you’ve got with us for that pig.”

“It was always Merle and I before this.” Implying that it would be no different, now. Only Daryl knew it would be. He knew.

Rick was staring him down with that sideways squint, a hand on his holster. The look seemed to say, _I thought we were through with all this._

Daryl stared back. _I guess not._ But he couldn’t hold the gaze for long before breaking it.

“Don’t,” Maggie pleaded as Daryl stalked back to the SUV, the swordswoman watching them from this distance with a guarded curiosity in her eyes. He passed her, throwing open the trunk to access his pack, his bow.

“What do you want us to tell Carol?” Glenn had tried, and this was like a knife in his shoulder. His movements hitched for a second, a second where he felt he could lay it all down and agree to get in the car. Carol, and what she had taught him.

Then reality had rushed back. Merle standing in the tree line, staring. “She’ll understand.”

Something slipped past Rick’s gaze like mourning. The other man realized this was the end—that he was really going. Daryl bit his cheek when he saw this change, nodded, turning away to address someone, anyone else before the thinness of his resolve snapped.

Only Rick had jogged after him as he went, bringing the look in his eyes.

“Hey,” the other man called out, grasping his upper arm to make him turn. “There has to be another way.”

He stared back into Rick’s gaze. “Don’t ask me to leave him.” He kept walking, and Rick kept following, grabbing his arm again. The fingers dug in, were not quick to let go.

“No him, no me,” Daryl repeated. “That’s all that I can say.”

Rick scanned the forest, exasperated, throwing a dark look in Merle’s direction. He thought the other man would’ve shot his brother by now, if he were not his brother. If he had not been standing right there. But, then again, they would not be in this situation if anyone other than his brother were there.

“Take care of yourself,” Daryl told Rick, promising himself it would be the last time he looked. Promising he would remember this man standing in front of him in the ripped dark blue flannel he would never get to repair, promising that the memory would be enough. “Take care of Lil Asskicker. Carl. He’s one tough kid.”

But he couldn’t stop himself from looking back one last time. And then, another.

* * *

“I really didn’t know,” Merle says, hoarse, from a few yards behind him. Daryl has not spoken to his brother since their scuffle, but has heard him scrambling to keep up with his furious pace through the thick woods over the past hour.

“Daryl, if I had known…” Merle is breathing hard. “I wouldn’t have just left. I’d have killed him.” Merle’s voice has some semblance of regret laced through it. “I’d have ended it for real.”

All Daryl’s been able to think about is the past, walking in this forest. Their pointless journey down and around this godforsaken patch of Georgia offering nothing to him but things he thinks he should’ve been over, already: ancient things, mired in the swamp of him, undead, alive. Blowing up at Merle had been a long time coming, he knew. He had often raged against his brother’s specter in dreams, in fevers—an arrow of poison through him like Prometheus, bound by his past, until he had the strength to take it, bodily, out.

Daryl had been there for it all, had to shoulder it all. His mother, wine drunk, accidentally letting it slip that he had been a mistake. Born so late after Merle, he should have been able to figure that one out on his own. Then the house fire and how it had killed her, mostly gentle, but left the father who beat him intact. At a bar, he had been, hustling pool. Getting good and drunk, waiting for an off-look from Daryl, a misstep, to wrap that leather belt around his knuckles and beat the weakness from the boy entire.

Merle’s almost-apology comes from beyond the grave, beyond the veil of the past. It is enough to soothe the rage inside him—antivenin enough to make his mind clear, now.

Daryl hesitantly brings his thumb to his mouth and chews it. He slows his pace, and after a while this allows Merle to catch up to him. They walk shoulder to shoulder.

“Are they really in trouble?” Daryl asks after a few minutes have passed. “Is this Governor really able to get through a whole-ass prison?” He brings his eyes to Merle’s, allowing himself to trust.

Merle swallows, nodding. “Yeah, little brother. I wasn’t jokin’ about that.”

Daryl sets his jaw. “Will you help us?”

Merle sighs heavily, looking around the woods at anything but Daryl, refusing to meet the gaze that waits for him there in those eyes. “Shit,” he drawls. Finally, he looks back. “Fine. I’ll make sure you and Officer Friendly get your… happy ending.”

Daryl presses his molars together but does not say a word. Just gives his brother one terse nod.

* * *

He sees the fight from a distance, a distance too far to do anything about. Neither his bow nor Merle’s gun would make a difference, this far off. So he runs as quickly as his legs and the roots at the edge of the forest will let him, his boots pounding into the dirt with Merle not far behind. He sees the black curls on the head above the bent, broken bodies of four or five walkers. Rick is on the outside of the fence, between them all.

“What’s he doin’?” Merle shouts after Daryl. A few seconds more, Daryl tells himself, gripping the center shaft of his crossbow as if his fingers were made of steel. A few seconds more and they’ll be in range.

He sees the shot open for him, pushing his heels in, loosing the bolt deftly toward its target. The walker crumples in front of Rick, whose shock and relief is painted in swathes across his features.

Then, Merle is yelling and running past him, launching his knife hand into the head of another. One by one they drop, Daryl sure to run interference against those closest to Rick, making a pathway out for the man who had just been within an inch of his life. Covering him for the second time, the last walker falling, Rick brings a shaky gaze up from the neutralized threat to Daryl’s face. The other man nods firmly, thankfully, and Daryl returns the gesture whole from across the yard.

It is later in the evening when Daryl rouses himself from the makeshift armory they’ve built adjacent to the kitchen, where he had been doing inventory and cleaning some of the guns that are part of heavy rotation.

“Hey,” he hears Rick call out as he passes the man’s cell, followed by a whistle. It is one they used out on the road, and it instinctively yanks Daryl back a few paces. He is surprised by the flurry of fabric thrown his way, once square within the doorframe to Rick’s cell. He catches it mid-air, recognizing it as the ripped flannel Rick was wearing in Woodbury.

Daryl looks into the cell to find Rick against his mattress, one hand hooked underneath his head. He is shirtless in the dank heat of the structure, as it is bereft of any kind of air conditioning or fan system to help control the raising summer temperature. Daryl knows—he is sweating now in his leather vest, despite it lacking sleeves.

“You still mind fixin’ it?” the other man asks. “It’s kinda become my favorite.”

“Sure,” Daryl agrees easily. “Said I would.” He slings it over his shoulder, beginning to back away and continue down the hall.

“Daryl, wait,” Rick says before he can leave. The other man hauls himself to a seated position, resting a hand against his own knee, as Daryl leans lightly on the cool concrete jamb of the doorway.

“I know I said it before,” Rick begins. “But I need you.”

Daryl’s tongue darts out to lick his bottom lip, unsure, crossing his arms against his chest. He waits for Rick to continue, holding those blue eyes’ gaze in the dimness.

“And it’s about more than just you bein’ able to fight, help protect us. Hell, you’ve saved my life more times than I can count.” Rick shifts his hand against his knee, that bent elbow swaying with some kind of nervous energy. “But, you know I’m not good. Everybody does, but you more than most.”

Daryl feels Rick’s gaze slip from his as one would feel fingers slide off their skin. The other man is worrying his palm into his kneecap, and Daryl knows he spends a lot of energy these days just trying to hold it all together. To be good.

“Despite it,” Rick continues, “you make me feel like… Maybe I will be okay. I dunno.” Rick sighs, lifts his eyes back up to Daryl’s and studies the other man’s face closely, gently. “Either way, it’s easier when you’re around, Daryl. I want you around. And I know Merle’s your blood, and he may end up bein’ useful to us, for now.”

 _He’s your brother, but he’s not good for you_ , Carol’s voice echoes in his mind.

“But—”

“I know,” Daryl cuts Rick off softly, nodding. “You all are my family, now.”

A few beats pass. Then, the corner of Rick’s mouth turns up. “Well. Judith will be glad to hear she’s got a godfather.”

Daryl can’t help the small smile that passes over his features. He runs a palm over his mouth, lifting Rick’s flannel from his shoulder.

“I should go, take care’a this.”

Rick nods. He extends his hand, grasps Daryl’s in an informal shake, hooking their thumbs at the joint and laying their fingertips against the pad of the other’s palm. The pressure is friendly, warm, brief.

“Thank you, brother.”

Back in his cell in the upper level of the block, Daryl lays down and kicks his feet up against the metal bunk frame. He makes use of the day’s dying light to guide his needle into the torn seam of Rick’s shirt, ensuring that the stitches are tight and even and will hold strong for months to come.

With his woolen poncho balled up into a pillow underneath his head, Daryl breathes in deeply. There is a slight scent coming from the flannel, something foreign to a space that smells totally of his own scent, is filled with his own things. Slightly, surely, he dares let a single hem of the fabric he holds drop down, brush against the tip of his nose, his cheekbone, before his eyes close briefly, briefly.

Then, he inhales again. And again.


	3. Mourning

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Daryl loses some things integral to himself. Takes place during S03E13 ~ S03E16.

The wooden seed house is surrounded by grasses so high that Daryl wonders how long, exactly, this structure’s been abandoned. Because the change did not seem to affect it so much, just expedite whatever decay had already been at work. It reminds him of the barns and other dilapidated farm-of-yore structures he would pass on those early morning summer rides, before the heat of the day melted him into the asphalt. Where lonesome county roads were chosen over highways, stretching out to the horizon, straight through green fields of peanuts and tobacco crops alike, dotted as they were with creosote-orange board-and-batten tenant houses long since reclaimed by nature.

He flanks Rick through the sky-scraping silos, their corrugated metal siding rusted, until they find themselves at the long and tall rectangle of the seed house. Rick motions for him to take the siding, follow it down to the opposite end, while he pushes silently in through the door. Daryl uses careful, hurried steps to bring him to the other end of the structure, before realizing that the Governor is already within the walls he stalked outside of. He can hear the rough treacle of the man’s voice, and, making sure Rick is safe, tries to steal a look through one busted out window into the dimness of the dusty interior.

There is a square table standing between them, which the Governor motions toward and Rick sets a wary eye over. He has his Python raised as the Governor removes a gun belt from around his waist, places it on a hook behind the table, out of reach. Once Rick throws a look his way, a silent _I’m fine_ , Daryl takes off to secure the rest of the immediate property.

On the other side of the seed house, Hershel pulls up in the SUV.

“He’s already in there. Sat down with Rick,” Daryl tells him through the open window. Hershel’s face is measured, those eyes shrewd as he mulls this over.

“I didn’t see any cars,” the other man says.

“It don’t feel right.” Daryl cannot stop casting a wary eye around the place, cannot suppress the nerves burning through him. “Keep it runnin’,” he tells Hershel, just about to scout a vantage point from which he can properly aim through that window of the seed house, when a vehicle approaches. He refuses to lower his crossbow from his cheek as they stop the car, pile out—two men who he does not recognize, and Andrea. He keeps his aim on the men while he calls to Andrea from the corner of his mouth.

“Why’s your boy already in there?”

She looks surprised, gaze immediately going to the metal door of the structure. “What?”

One of the men, the one who had been driving, throws her a knowing smirk. She lets out a humorless scoff before going over to the metal door, sliding it open, stepping inside.

Their louder voices can be heard from outside, but the quieter words go unheard. Daryl eventually lowers his bow but keeps it close, stalking around the hood of their car. He is impatient, on edge, and the man who had been driving from the Governor’s camp will not stop looking at him with a kind of lackadaisical, domineering gaze. It starts to piss him off.

“Maybe I should go inside,” Hershel suggests, equitable and even. No doubt he is trying to get ahead of the brewing tension.

But one of the Governor’s men responds immediately, looking up from his notebook for the first time since his arrival.

“The Governor thought it best if he and Rick spoke privately.” The voice is soft and free of an accent. He turns back to his notebook.

“Who the hell are you?” Daryl asks.

The man looks up again. “Milton,” he says. “Mamet.”

“Great, he brought his butler.”

Daryl sees the Governor’s man, the driver, chuckle.

“I’m his advisor,” Milton corrects him.

“What kind of advice?”

“Planning,” Milton begins, “biters. Uh, you know,” he says, a measured arrogance edging into the tone, “I don’t feel like explaining myself to the henchmen.”

The muscle in Daryl’s jaw jumps. “Better watch your mouth, sunshine,” he threatens.

The driver finally speaks, his eyes running up the length of Daryl’s body.

“Look, if you and I are gonna be out here pointin’ guns at each other all day, do me a favor—” The man’s easy smile sours. “Shut up.”

Daryl advances, cutting a menacing figure as he steps within inches of the man. He has a slight height advantage, but this does not deter the other man, who seems almost amused at this show of bravado. There is a spark in his dark eyes that makes Daryl uneasy, a violence in that smile, now.

With a few buffering words from Hershel, Daryl backs off. More than a handful of minutes pass while the negotiations carry on inside, in which Daryl feels the anxiety beginning to bite at his reserves. He lets out a shaky breath, unable to decide between leaning against the car or pacing. He has done either one or the other for the past twenty minutes, alternating almost every other minute.

Warily, Milton approaches. “There’s no reason not to use this time we have together to explore the issues ourselves.”

“Boss said to sit tight and shut up,” the driver replies, exacting.

“Don’t you mean the Governor?” Daryl responds lowly, sarcastic. He enjoys the irritation that raises in the other man’s gaze, firmly on him, now.

“It’s a good thing they’re sitting down,” Milton continues, matter-of-fact. “Especially after what happened. They’re gonna work it out.” Milton is looking at Hershel. “Nobody wants another battle.”

Daryl scoffs, making light of the other man’s strange speech. “I wouldn’t call it a battle.”

“I would call it a battle, and I did.” Milton looks at him with a mixture of curiosity and knowing. He lifts his notebook. “I recorded it.”

“What for?”

“Somebody’s got to keep a record of what we’ve gone through. It’ll be a part of our history.”

“That makes sense,” Hershel responds. Daryl can see the other man measure Milton up, take him in, decide.

Milton sees this too. He moves toward Hershel excitedly.

“I’ve got dozens of interviews—”

He is interrupted by the distant howling of walkers. Off the property something metallic falls, or is run into. Daryl, Andrea, and the Governor’s man rush out to neutralize the potential problem.

Daryl is the first one around the silo, where a few walkers spaced out between the structures. It has poor visibility, and is a tight spot to fight in. Daryl starts to pull the trigger on his bow then thinks better of it, goading the driver, who is standing next to him.

“After you,” he quips, bending half-sideways like some kind of shitty maître d'.

The other gestures with his blood-stained bat. “No way. You first.”

Andrea groans with impatience and pushes past them, through the testosterone-filled air, sinking her blade into the first walker with a yell. It hits the silo, then slides with a metallic whine to the dirt below.

“Pussy,” the other man chides Daryl, swinging his bat as he advances on the next walker in line. Daryl scoffs, uncharacteristically holding back to watch the other work. He shrugs, unimpressed, at the bat-flattened viscera against the silo, then rushes forward as he spots his own opening for a kill. The Governor’s man uses some more fancy bat work, and Daryl barely notices Andrea’s exasperated sigh, nor her departure, as they compete like this, a ritualistic male one-upmanship.

Daryl steals the last kill by throwing his hunting knife, blade first. The other man turns to look at him, a mixture of pissed off and impressed.

With the walkers handled, Daryl starts to rummage through the pockets of the dead. The midday sun has turned the air hot, and he is wearing long sleeves. He is tired of the nerves buzzing around his body—of thinking of Rick, thinking of the dimness within the seed house, thinking of all the ways it could go wrong. The walkers and the brief, stupid show of muscle had been a welcome relief, but now he does not want to return to the car, to the siding of that structure.

His fingers wrap around a plastic-covered paper package inside one of the walker’s breast pockets. It feels familiar in his hand, and looks familiar to his eyes.

“Hey,” he calls. “Look what he’s got.”

The driver is leaning lazily against a wire-supporting wooden pole, and throws him a disinterested look as Daryl offers up a cigarette from the almost-depleted pack.

“I prefer menthols.”

“Douchebag,” Daryl comments with a laugh. He gets his zippo out and lights his own cigarette, inhaling deeply. The other man tosses that metal bat around loosely in his grip, tongue running over his bottom lip. Daryl studies him.

“You army or somethin’?”

“Nah,” comes the reply, “I just hate these things. After what they did to my wife, kids.”

Daryl drags deeply. “Sucks,” he says, with a modicum more sympathy than usual.

The other man hums. “Thanks.” Then those dark eyes slide to his. “You know this is a joke, right?” he asks. “They ain’t gonna work anything out.”

Daryl tilts his head.

“Sure, they’ll do their little dance, but tomorrow or the next day…” Those black eyes graze Daryl’s features, suddenly somber. “They’ll give the word.”

“I know,” Daryl replies. They share the understanding that they could die in this _battle_ , be gone by this time tomorrow, or a week from now.

The other man motions toward the cigarettes. “Hey,” he says, his way of asking.

Daryl reaches into his back pocket, around the red rag, and pulls out the quarter-full pack.

“They’re stale as hell, but they’re somethin’.”

He watches as the other man leans his bat and gun against the pole, then runs the filter along the inner edge of his lips before holding it there.

“You gonna light me, or what?”

Daryl digs in his pocket for his zippo. Something in that dark eyed gaze changes as the sun shifts closer to the horizon. But maybe, maybe it is only the talk of the imminent violence that has woken this feeling inside him. Maybe it is just his body’s reaction to the newness of the nicotine buzz.

He reaches his arms out, flicks the zippo, and is surprised when the other’s hand comes up to cup his own against the flame. The man leans forward, inhaling, cheeks hollowing out, as he sucks in a lungful of smoke. Daryl quickly flips the zippo’s lid down, slips his knuckles away from the heat he feels radiating off the other man’s palm.

“What’s your name, again?” comes the question, casual, as he withdraws. Daryl scans the look thrown his way, tries to unknot those eyes. He watches the blue smoke escape his lips, held open, waiting for an answer.

“Daryl,” he responds gruffly. “You?”

The other takes a long drag of the cigarette. “Martinez,” he says. “Caesar, if you want.” Then Martinez pushes himself off the pole, advancing step by step toward Daryl.

Daryl wants to edge sideways, ready to reach back for his bow. But instead, he finds himself taking another drag from his cigarette, staring with his eyes squinted, waiting warily to learn exactly what it is that Martinez and his eyes want.

Daryl grabs the wrist of the hand that attempts to bunch into the hem of his shirt, holding it fast. He takes in an involuntary breath of surprise as his spine knocks against the siding of the silo, dropping his cigarette at the same time Martinez flicks his own to the side. The man’s face is hovering close to his, and Daryl can feel warmth wash over him in waves.

Then, all at once, that sturdy body is pressing up against his, and that mouth is parting to push a wet tongue past his own lips. Daryl tightens his grip on the wrist he has arrested, feeling another hand come up to pull his jaw forward, move his mouth open enough to accept the tongue slipping so easily inside. The hand against his hip inches down to massage his cock through the worn denim of his jeans and, with a white-hot pang of desire, Daryl realizes he is allowing it.

Something like a snake raises its head inside of his abdomen. It is twining itself seductively, welcoming him into its slithering movements. He is simultaneously threatened and intrigued, caught between the two so much that it has frozen him. He cannot help but sway between them for a moment, just a moment, on the edge of succumbing.

Daryl bucks into the palm, once, moaning low into the mouth against his. He cannot remember the last time someone has touched him this way; the hand moving to deftly unbuckle his belt, slip past his waistband to make skin-on-skin contact. His groan is muffled by the ferocity of the kiss, which allows no room for words. And Daryl wants it that way. He wants it.

Then he finds himself thinking of Rick. Rick in the seed house, in danger, while he gets off with the enemy. Martinez moves to rid himself of his own belt before Daryl is disentangling from the man with a flash-bang suddenness, pushing him roughly away.

“Shit, sorry,” Martinez chuckles, backing off, wiping the knuckles of his hand across his mouth. “You were giving off a vibe, bro.”

Daryl stares at the other man, eyes hard. His animal reflex is to slam him against the silo, have his way, chase a meaningless, mind-numbing release. But he bites his cheek, moving to pull out another cigarette and light it. His hands are shaking so much that he thinks he might burn himself.

“Hey, no hard feelings.” Martinez’s tone is still amused, a placid distance between them. “I saw the way you were worryin’ over your guy. Rick, or whatever. Thought you could use a distraction.”

Daryl says nothing. He turns a wary eye toward the other man as Martinez regards him with some mixture of unsated desire and uncertainty. He can see Martinez debate taking a step toward him again, making Daryl move a step away in preemptive response, warning. Getting the message, Martinez fixes his belt and leans heavily back against the pole.

“If y’all are monogamous or whatever, just with each other, I get it. It was only about the sex,” the other man finishes, lazily looking over his shoulder at the fields stretching out beyond the mill, the endless, light blue sky.

Daryl swallows hard around his tight throat, can taste smoke and the other man’s tongue. “Rick and me ain’t—” he starts. “I don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”

Martinez licks his lips before he smirks. “That must be hard for you.” Those brown eyes flick over the length of Daryl’s body, non-threatening and yet incredibly so. “Unrequited… lust.”

Daryl doesn’t have anything to say in response, nothing that would pin the other into place and make him feel stable enough to process what exactly has happened, is happening, within him. All he can do is smoke, trying to swallow that writhing snake before it climbs out of his throat, whole. He is stumbling over the words:

“I shou—should get back.”

Martinez laughs. “Okay, Daryl. Thanks for the cig.”

Daryl shifts his gaze before taking off on unsteady legs, weaving between the behemoth silos and their light-reflecting wrapping. He sets his jaw and holds it closed so tightly he feels like his teeth might crack, might develop stress fractures from the pressure of keeping his mouth shut.

When Martinez comes back from the field, Daryl is leaned resolutely against the side of the seed house. The concrete reminder of why he’s here helps take the edge out of him, as well as the tobacco. He finishes the whole pack before Rick and the Governor exit, finally, well into the afternoon. The deep relief of seeing Rick, physically unscathed, mixes muddily against his stoked lust, his stunted desire, and the heat from the sun retaliating against his long sleeves.

Rick’s eyes catch the light as they regard him, hardened, harrowed. When it is just them, before Hershel has maneuvered into the passenger’s seat, Rick calls him over to the open car window.

“I need you,” the man mutters, his voice strangled. Daryl almost doesn’t hear him, walking his bike closer.

“You okay?”

Rick blinks a few times, then moves his head sharply to one side in a shake. “No.”

Daryl nods, understanding. “Okay. Tell me where to be.” His voice is easy, gentle.

Rick’s eyes are on fire in the near-evening light. “Your room,” he states. “Tonight.”

Daryl grinds his molars against the wind the whole ride home, daring himself to think of nothing—absolutely nothing.

…

It is sometime after dinner when Rick’s voice casts itself from across the entrance to his cell.

“How can you see in here?” Rick asks, a slim shadow moving into the space. Daryl sits up quickly from where he had been lying, his vest open against his bare chest. Truthfully, Daryl had been lost in thought. But, not liking the murky closeness that the dark invites within him now that Rick is here, he stands to flick the flame of his zippo into existence, lighting a candle in the corner. Another candle flame pops up in the corner of his eye, guttering weakly from a match that Rick has put to it.

They turn to take a seat at the same time, almost colliding in the narrow cell. Daryl feels the heat of Rick’s surprised breath wash over his cheek, and the man’s hand flies up to hold Daryl steady at his abdomen, warm and firm.

Daryl quickly withdraws, lowering himself hastily back to his mattress while Rick begins to peel his canvas jacket off, moving deeper into the candle-lit cell—Daryl notices for the first time that day that he is wearing the navy flannel. Rick throws his jacket over the back of the metal chair Daryl has squeezed into the corner of the cell before taking a seat. The man runs a heavy hand over his face, his beginning of a beard, not meeting Daryl’s gaze.

“Surprised you haven’t been down there, with the rest of them,” Rick drawls. He hasn’t relaxed for even a moment since the meeting with the Governor, Daryl can tell.

“Ain’t ever been one for guessin’ games,” Daryl responds, knowing most of the conversations occurring are only serving to repeat the same information. He has already decided he will do what Rick decides—whether that means fight or flight.

Daryl keeps the proceeding silence good company, waiting for the other man to start. He has mastered this craft, finds it much easier to do knowing that Rick is safe for now, and in front of him, his form warmly lit by the dancing candle flames.

Eventually, Rick sighs. “He got to me.”

“The Governor?”

Rick nods. He lifts his vision slowly to Daryl’s, absently studies his face, eyes faraway.

“Well, he’s an asshole. You just gotta push it outta your mind, whatever it was.”

“But it wasn’t just him bein’ an asshole,” Rick responds. His eyes focus on Daryl’s. “He talked about Shane, and Lori. Knew about Judith bein’...”

“Bein’ what?” Daryl asks.

“Bein’ Shane’s.” Rick’s eyes are resigned. “He knows everything. About us, about the prison.”

Daryl lets out a heavy breath through his nose. “Shit. Andrea hand over great grandma’s secret casserole recipe, too?”

The shadow of a smile graces Rick’s lips, brightening the man’s wearied face for a moment. Then a thought passes over his features, muting it. Rick pauses a beat, becomes shrewd. “You get to talk to his men at all? Hershel said there were some walkers that came, at some point.”

Daryl shrugs his vest closer to him, self-conscious under Rick’s hawkish gaze. The rough outline of Martinez returns to him, in his mind, and he has to swallow that very visceral memory before he can speak to the man so close in front of him.

“Nah,” he says, stilted. “Just that what happened, not bein’ able to make a deal, was always gonna happen.”

“How’d they seem though, the men?” Rick presses, leaning forward. Daryl hears an erratic thrum underneath Rick’s words, and realizes it is the sound of his own beating heart. “Any information could help us, Daryl. I don’t like knowin’ less than him.”

“I—I really don’t know, Rick,” Daryl says. “He’s got an advisor, Milton, I think, who writes down everythin’. Helps the Governor with planning, he said. But there wasn’t much talkin’ goin’ on, just—” Daryl chews his cheek. “We mostly just stood around, waitin’ to hear some kinda shots from inside.”

Rick’s jaw is set, the skin on his face pale. His eyes are bright, though, searching.

“I could talk to Merle, ask him what he knows.” Daryl makes the excuse because he is hyperaware of Rick being in his space—Rick’s every movement, Rick’s eyes. Rick’s scent. That jab floats back to him now, brushes around the shell of his ear: _Must be hard for you._ _Unrequited… lust._

Rick sits back, still thinking. “Yeah. That’d be good.” He stands suddenly to leave, and Daryl leans back into his bunk to keep his distance. He looks up as Rick moves to put his jacket back on, arm by arm.

“You want me to take the shift on the catwalk tonight?”

Rick shakes his head. “I’ll get it. If I sleep, bein’ alone, I’m just gonna see somethin’.”

Daryl bites his tongue, suppressing the want to walk through this door that Rick has unwittingly opened by offering his continued company. That is when Rick reaches down, grasps his shoulder, squeezes.

“Thank you.”

“Rick,” Daryl calls, the man just out of the doorway. He turns back, expression open, tired.

“I could—We could pull patrol together,” he manages. “Take shifts, so you could sleep. Y’know, while I’m there.”

Rick smiles slightly. “I won’t make you babysit me. But if you find yourself wantin’ to split a smoke at four a.m.—you know where to find me.”

Daryl swallows, watching Rick leave, listening to his even boot falls as he walks the upper level, descends the staircase. He closes his eyes tightly, bunching his sheet in one fist, ears ringing with the effort—the omniscient effort of denying this, as he has been denying it for a while now.

“Fuck you, Martinez,” Daryl breathes, throwing himself back against his mattress, as the cell block door is slammed shut by Rick’s hand, the hollow metallic sound reverberating off the walls.

…

That night he has a dream. He dreams about the silos, only now they are stark in the silence of the still night, as unmoving as headstones in God’s forgotten graveyard.

Daryl tilts his head back in the coolness of the dark air, feeling it rush over his throat, his gaze wandering toward the moon hung, an eye forever watching, in the perfect midnight blue.

“The mourning moon,” a familiar voice calls. Daryl whips his head around, seeking the source of the sound, and finds Rick leaned elegantly against a wooden pole that supports long-disused wires. The man is smoking one of Daryl’s cigarettes, the ember burning brightly in the night. It illuminates his hollowing cheek, the fine ridge of his nose, before the whole picture is obfuscated by smoke blown from between two lips. Daryl aches, sharply, for nicotine, and finds that he cannot bid his arms to reach back and search for the pack in his pocket. He is frozen.

Rick flicks the cigarette to the side, pushing off the pole as steadfast and sure as anything. Daryl is focused on the man’s eyes, aware of their cool, predatory glint. Those boots slide through the waving, damp grass underfoot, pointed purposefully in his direction. Daryl has never realized how much his boot tips resemble the coppery brown heads of pit vipers, before.

Rick’s lissome form is one wavering, blue flame as it approaches. Daryl cannot do anything but watch the other man, unable to move his limbs.

“Is this… hard, for you?” Rick’s eyes are bright, so bright, regarding his face from such a close distance. The voice is a low drawl, something violent in it, something wanting.

This is the moment Daryl realizes he is dreaming. All at once, Rick’s warm hand sidles his abdomen above the hip, and something is lifting Daryl’s own palm up to meet Rick’s jaw. Then in a cold flash of teeth he is kissing Rick, pulling Rick closer, as Rick is kissing him back. It is searing, the kiss itself and the act of keeping it, and Daryl finds himself close to tears from pain.

When he wakes, he does not move for many minutes. It is a gentle waking, his eyes opening seamlessly, tears rolling from their corners to become lost in the hair by his ears. He registers the morning light in his cell as he lays in the lasting pool of the dream. Its waters lap at him from beyond.

Eventually, he flips over onto his stomach. There is something akin to an animal inside him again, and it is undeniable in its desires. He knows he cannot grit his teeth through it any longer, so he slithers a hand down his stomach to the crux of his legs.

It isn’t long at all before he’s cumming hard with a shaky, stilted sigh.

…

After a difficultly swallowed breakfast, Rick takes Daryl out to the side yard with Hershel in tow. They walk down the drab hall, Hershel’s crutches keeping an even rhythm which echoes off the concrete walls. The older man is troubled—will not meet his eyes.

“I’m just gonna say it,” Rick begins once they have made sure they are alone, dark hair absorbing the already-bright sunlight. His eyes bore into Daryl’s, voice low. “Yesterday, the Governor offered us a truce in return for Michonne. I’m gonna take it.”

Daryl feels his brow furrow. Hershel watches him, Rick watches him absorb this information in silence. The early summer insects hum their songs just beyond the fence, a steady buzz that seems to sink into the skin itself. A few walkers past the fence aimlessly clang against it, trying to get to them.

“This the only way?” Daryl finally asks with a quiet disbelief.

“It’s the only way. None of the others know.”

“You gonna tell ‘em?”

Rick shakes his head. “Not ‘til after. We have to do it today. It has to be quiet.”

Daryl works on swallowing this decision. It is like a horse pill, caught in his throat. “You got a plan?”

“We tell her we need to talk. Away from the others.”

Daryl shifts his gaze to Hershel, who will not meet it. He looks back to Rick, taking in that face, those eyes. There is an acute feeling in him of the man he used to be—who he had been before finding this place, and Carol, and Rick. Before the hardness of the winter and the human kindnesses he witnessed made something soft and sustaining in him, changed him, forever.

“It just ain’t us man,” he admits, finally. “This ain’t who we are.”

“No. No, it isn’t,” Hershel concurs tersely. He collects his crutches under his arms, not saying a word nor looking at either of them, before swinging away.

After a moment of watching the older man take his leave, Rick resets, steps closer to Daryl. “We do this, we avoid a fight. No one else dies.”

Daryl swallows. He knows Rick is trying to convince himself, still, as much as he is trying to convince Daryl. He knows how fiercely Rick will protect his family, making moves at the risk of his own identity. He is watching a man make a choice that will move him further from himself, further from the sanity he is trying so hard to hold on to.

But what else is there, besides this family?

“Alright,” Daryl agrees, moving his eyes from Rick’s mouth, so close, the word barely a whisper.

Rick takes a step away, obviously neither soothed nor swayed. He is just thinking, always thinking about the next thing that has to happen. “We need someone else,” he decides. Probably had already decided.

Daryl nods. “I’ll talk to ‘im.”

“I’ll do it.”

Daryl shrugs, beginning to walk. “I’ll go with you.”

“No.” Rick’s voice is terse. His hand comes up to halt Daryl’s movements. “Just me.”

Daryl cannot help but advance as Rick walks away—follow, for a moment, the path of the man’s footsteps across the side yard. He doesn’t like it, adjusting his grip on his bow: The incalculable possibility for things to go south. Even when it is only himself with Merle, the possibility of things going south is high. He feels sick imagining the seconds leading up to the encounter between Merle and Rick, the moment when Rick is one on one with his brother and trying to persuade him, ask him for help. Merle will be raw and unfiltered without Daryl’s presence there.

He knocks the butt of his bow with a sudden violence against the fence where the two walkers are still snuffling. With a yell, he stalks away.

What feels like quite some time later, his feet bring him to the hallway of the comms room, where he hears something that sets him on edge. He calls out.

“Merle?”

He has his bow raised. He drops it upon seeing the white tank top, Merle’s flat face above it.

“What the hell?” he asks, taking a suspicious look around the room before setting his eyes back on Merle.

“Hey, little brother,” the other man says. “Was just about to holler back at ya.”

“Whatcha doin’ down here?”

Merle shrugs, his body held awkwardly. “Just lookin’ for a little crystal, man.”

Daryl gives him a look.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. Shit will mess my life up, just when everything is goin’ so sweet.” Merle laughs, but Daryl’s tone is unamused.

“You talk to Rick yet?”

“Yeah. Oh, yeah. I’m in.” Merle continues, the admission a murmur. “But uh… he ain’t got the stomach for it. He’s gonna buckle—you know that, ri’?”

Daryl nods solemnly. “Yeah.” He tries to push the thought out of his mind that buckling, here, to Merle, means choosing to back out, be weak, over going through with plans, no matter how ill-made. So he shrugs; he knows that buckling wouldn’t be what Rick would do. But, he thinks the possibility of the other man rethinking his choice, changing his mind, acting like himself and putting up a fight—Well, he hopes for that possibility. Hopes against hope.

“If he does, he does,” Daryl says with a light finality.

“You want him to?” Merle asks, incisive.

Daryl shrugs. “Whatever he says, goes.”

Merle finds distaste in this. He scoffs. “Do you even possess a pair of balls, little brother?” He sways, swaggers back against the tool bench behind him. “I thought you did, back in that forest, but—Are they even attached?”

Daryl knows where this conversation is going. He tries to look away, shake his head dismissively, but he knows that Merle sees it on his face. Can see what Martinez saw. He starts to walk away.

“I mean, if they are: do they belong to you?” Merle asks, pointed. “Or do they belong to Rick?” He pauses and the air between them is loaded. Daryl knows Merle knows, now. And he cannot say anything about it that wouldn’t just make it more true.

Merle’s teeth are bared with disgust as he continues. “What happened?” The words that follow are barely a whisper, only a nagging hiss. “You actually _in love_ , little brother? Or just dick-whipped?”

Daryl changes the subject quickly, as this isn’t what he came down here for. It would be fruitless, this conversation started and left half-finished between them many times before, over men from before. It was an inseparable part of him, and unacceptable in Merle’s eyes. Nothing will change in him, or in his brother. So in the end, it doesn’t matter as much as other things Daryl wants to ask.

He knowingly retaliates, “What happened with you and Glenn? And Maggie?”

Merle’s eyes are hard. “I’ve done worse,” he says. “You need to grow up. Stop with this...” he waves his knife arm around the air in the damp room, “fantasy. Things are different now.”

In a way, Daryl agrees. He can’t help but realize that things are different—but just between them. Not for anything else, just for the chasm, grown gaping, between them.

“Your people look at me like I’m the devil,” Merle bites, aiming to wound, to maul. “And you do, too, now, for grabbing up those lovebirds like I did. Now you and your _boyfriend_ wanna do the same damn thing: Snatch someone up, deliver them to the Governor.” Merle puffs his chest out righteously, lets the next words slip out, coated in venom. “Just like me.”

Daryl feels the words worm under his skin.

“Yeah,” Merle purrs, knowing he has struck a nerve. “People do what they gotta, or they die.”

_People… or you?_

“Can’t do things without people anymore, man.” And it really is this simple to Daryl. He has allowed himself to bend in ways that Merle does not allow himself to bend, and this makes him flexible, strong, instead of bitter, rigid. Brittle, like the husk of a man standing now in front of him.

“Maybe these people need somebody like me around, huh? Do their dirty work. Be the bad guy. Maybe that’s how it is, now.” He juts his chin out at Daryl, challenging. “How’s that hit you?”

Daryl sets his jaw. He feels so far away. Even his hand on his brother’s shoulder brings no comfort, cannot cross the chasm so wide. “I just want my brother back,” he admits with a gentleness that breaks his own heart. And, for once, he lets it break. Lets himself feel it. Lets himself mourn.

Merle sees this transpire all in the space of a few seconds. He shifts away from his hand, rough. Those eyes are hard again, even if the voice and the words are weak and shattered.

“Get outta here, fag.”

Daryl’s not shocked by the slur; it is one of a hundred times he has heard the word come out of Merle’s mouth. Still, he lingers for a moment, trying to figure out what has happened and what will happen. But it is clear that Merle won’t be responding, won’t be changing, won’t bend like he has bent. He knows this like he knows how to track, can pull the tell-tale signs out of thin air.

So, he walks away. Leaves Merle to his meth.

It is his shift for watchout duty, taking over for Maggie. He stalks the yard, scanning the horizon, with his bow a firm diagonal across his chest.

Rick is looking around the towers in the courtyard, jogging over to where Daryl stands.

“It’s off,” he calls. “We’ll take our chances.”

Daryl feels relief rush through him. He clocks the shifty look on Rick’s face, those eyes that are darting from window to window, platform to platform. “What’s wrong?”

“I can’t find Merle or Michonne. They’re gone.”

Daryl’s mind jumps. “C’mon,” he tells Rick, leading them quickly up the stairs and then down into the comms room.

“He was in here. Said he was lookin’ for drugs. Said a lot of things, actually.”

“Like what?”

“Said that you were gonna—Here we go.” Daryl reaches for a tatter of cloth, scans the boot patterns in the dust of the concrete floor, the small blood, sweat, and saliva droplets splattered in an arc. “Yeah. He took her here. They mixed it up.”

“Damn it,” Rick curses. He starts jogging toward the door. “I’m going after him.”

Daryl follows, tries to get in front of the other man. “You can’t track for shit,” he calls, catching up.

“Well, then the both of us,” Rick assents.

“Nah, just me.” Daryl positions himself between Rick and the door, his bow still drawn and finger lying next to the trigger. “I said I’d go, and I’ll go.” He pauses for a moment, thinking about what Merle told him. Thinking about what Martinez told him. Thinking about why he wants to keep Rick safe from this, then allowing this singular thought to shape his next words.

“They’re gonna come back here,” he continues darkly, meaning the Governor and his army. “You need to be ready, all of you.”

He thinks he knows what he will have to do, one way or another. He feels it, like a shadow of a bird passing over his face: That this story is ending, or maybe ended a long time ago. That he will have to kill Merle, one way or another. Knows that it has come to this with the certainty Cain once had: To protect his family, he had to do the only wickedly human thing possible. The only thing that could right the world in the face of a cruel, vacillating God.

This is why Daryl can’t bear to look as he pushes the door open with his back, and a slat of sunlight catches diagonally across Rick’s face. _What I wouldn’t do._ One of those blue eyes is illuminated and he glances—for a fraction of a second—before he pulls his eyes away again. He knows this is as good as a confession, feels it in his bones, even if Rick is clueless to the amount of emotion that is transpiring, has always transpired, behind the scenes.

“You’re family, too,” Daryl murmurs. Then, he’s gone.

After a few minutes, he runs into Michonne on the road. She is pulling her sword out of a walker, as casual as anything, and looking tired but unscathed.

Daryl halts his running, coming to a slow stop. The sun is high in the sky above him. He squints.

“Where’s my brother?” he finally asks, quiet. There is no violence in him, only a desire to know. He has accepted it, and he would understand it. “You kill him?”

Michonne’s voice is soft, seeing this. “No. He let me go.”

Before she can say anything else, Daryl is off. “Don’t let anyone come after me,” he tells her, throwing the words over his shoulder. She will make it back, Daryl knows—as strong as any of them, as capable. His relief at seeing her alive, knowing what it means, sparks some kind of impetus in his feet.

He thinks briefly of Rick, the look of puzzlement on his face as they stared at one another only a few moments ago. He knows where Merle’s tracks are leading him, knows he is heading into the snake pit, into where the Governor will be waiting for Michonne. He is heading into the snake pit as one strangles him from the inside, out.

He is pulled as a magnet is toward an opposite pole, toward an inevitable end. The half-empty Johnnie Walker bottle near the opened driver’s side door of the classic car that Merle would have chosen, would’ve found somehow, even with such a limited supply to choose from.

The only living things he finds are undead walkers, littered between the silos. The dead eating the dead with blank stares and horribly machinating jaws. Daryl steps around them, looses bolts through them as needed, following Merle’s footsteps from the car. But even those only get half his attention as he waits, in this liminal space between what has not happened and what he knows has happened.

This is when he sees him, Merle—turned. He pushes him bodily away, but he is like a tetherball that keeps coming back. He starts to wail, pushing him and pushing him. He is thinking how rigid the body is, how much like rigor mortis those useless limbs are, that gaping mouth, those yellow and bloodied eyes filled with a vacant hunger. He is thinking, _I buried you a long time ago_. Of course it wasn’t real. Of course it couldn’t have lasted.

The shoves give way when Merle falls to the ground, Daryl descending with him, ramming his knife through his brother’s neck. The dead dies, again. Then he is stabbing the face—over and over and over and over.

He falls back, unable to keep himself up, crying.

…

The roar of his bike pushes the echoing gunshot from his ears. Andrea. Rick’s voice thick with tears. The darkness and silence of the shipping container hallway, the holding cell. All this he carries with him. He leans into it, into the coolness pooling from the tree line set starkly against the highway.

He is in his cell, staring at the floor between his feet, when Rick steps in and raps his knuckles lightly against the concrete jamb. Daryl looks up. He thinks they make a good mirror to one another, both their faces touched by loss, haggard.

“Everyone’s getting acclimated,” Rick says softly, the tone edged. He is referring to the busload they have brought back from Woodbury, their new wards. “It’s gonna be a lot more lively in here, soon.”

Daryl just nods, moving his gaze back down to the floor. He plays with his lip, chewing absently on the nail of his thumb.

“You okay?” Rick asks him, voice rasping with the sorrow of it, but somehow stronger than it has been in weeks. Maybe not a mirror, then; as Daryl’s insides crumble at the simple, silent attention the other man pours over him, now. He feels himself begin to cry, the tears dropping one by one against the concrete, falling numbly from his face.

Then Rick is collecting him, pulling him up by his sleeves to his feet and into a close hug. Those good arms wrap around him and Daryl gives in to the touch, tears breaking into a noisy, muffled bawling. He is pressing his face into Rick’s neck as the other man supports him, grasps at him, keeps him up. He winds his fists desperately into the fabric of the navy flannel as grief wracks his body, pulling, pulling.

It is nighttime when he extracts himself from Rick, quiet now except for the occasional hiccoughing shudder through him. Rick moves his hands from where he had been running his fingers through Daryl’s hair to across his face, wiping the tears and snot away with rough, measured palms.

Daryl looks down at Rick’s arm and side, the spot on his shirt that he had repaired. His stitches held up.

“Rick, I—” Daryl begins, his voice affected greatly by his crying. It sounds foreign to him in the silence of his cell, the murky darkness that surrounds them. He reaches up to take Rick’s hand from his face, grasping it, feeling the wedding band firm against his own fingers. He doesn’t dare breathe as he leans forward toward Rick’s faint outline, finds the lips he seeks.

It is gentle, like he’s grown to know how to be despite the harshness of the world. He brushes his hand against Rick’s hip, steadying it as he presses his mouth to the other man’s, lips chapped but ardent. He darts his tongue out to taste Rick, and learns his unique flavor when Rick’s mouth opens to accept his ministrations. He feels holy, scoured clean.

Rick eventually breaks away, pulling back imperceptibly to lay his forehead against Daryl’s.

“You’ve held onto that a long time, hm?” Rick murmurs. Daryl nods against him. Rick moves farther back, pressing his lips briefly to Daryl’s forehead before disentangling their fingers, backing away.

“I can’t,” Rick says. Daryl catches the flash of his blue eyes in the scant light coming in from outside, from the stars coming out on this incredibly clear night. “Not yet.”

Daryl stares. They both breathe for a few moments in this space. Then, Daryl nods.

“Okay,” he says, simply.

Rick regards him. “Doesn’t change anythin’,” he says. “You’re still family. Always will be.”

“I know,” Daryl replies. He feels calm and unburdened in the moment. Unsure of what tomorrow will bring into his heart but is, for now, relieved.

“If you need anythin’,” Rick tells him. He does not have to finish the sentence.

“I know where to find you,” Daryl echoes.

Rick nods, approving. “Goodnight, Daryl.”

“Night.”

Rick leaves, his unhurried bootfalls echoing evenly down the hall, down the staircase. Daryl sinks back down to his mattress. He doesn’t know where to begin, but this is a good thing for once.

A wonderful thing.


End file.
